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Brainteaser: How many Native Americans Are There Today?

Answer:  More than 60 million.  

Examples of countries with large populations include Mexico with about 15 million, Peru with about 14 million, and Bolivia and Guatemala with about 6 million Native people each.      

In the United States there are over 5 million American Indian people, constituting about 2 percent of the total population.    

The U.S. Census Bureau provides statistics for more than 600 American Indian and Alaska Native legal and statistical areas and there are over 550 federally recognized tribes.

California has the largest self-identified Native population, with about 700,000 people.

New York has the largest Native population of any U.S. city, and Los Angeles, with over 50,000 people, has the second largest. 

Over a thousand different Native American languages are spoken in the world today. There are over 8 million speakers of Quechuan languages, nearly 3 million speakers of Aymara, and more than 5 million Guaraní speakers. There are at least 6 million speakers of Mayan languages.  

In 1800, at least 80 different languages were spoken in the present-day U.S. state of California. Efforts are underway to preserve and revitalize many of them.

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